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USW Blog

Running east-west through the middle of the Little Rock, Ark., metro area, Interstate 630 divides Arkansas’ capital city from its top suburb in more ways than one.
Not only does the federally funded freeway split Little Rock on the south from North Little Rock on the north, but it also splits the whiter, richer north side of the metro area, from the poorer, black and brown south side.
That segregation’s intentional. And that’s common, from Detroit’s Eight Mile Road to Chicago’s Dan Ryan Expressway to New York City’s Robert Moses building bridges low enough so that city buses, carrying blacks, couldn’t drive under them on the way to the Big Apple’s beaches.
And that’s what advocates of pumping billions of new federal dollars U.S. highways, railroads, subways and airports want to prevent from happening again.
Studies show that from Baltimore to Detroit, from Little Rock to Chicago, highways – and, before them, railroads – were deliberately sited by governments and built by either governments or companies to maintain or extend racial and class segregation. And there were unusual twists like Moses’ anti-bus bridges, too.
And while an airport site might be neutral racially, flight paths the planes follow nationwide in takeoffs or landings are another matter, speakers at a May 13 infrastructure symposium said. Guess who suffers the most plane noise from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport? Hint, unless you’re on the North Shore late on summer evenings, it’s not ultra-ritzy Kenilworth.
And federally funded expressways not only split the races, but often, especially after the advent of mass suburbanization following World War II, permitted “white flight” from central cities, studies show.
So Chicago’s monstrous Dan Ryan Expressway not only separates whites from blacks on the South Side, deliberately, but lets other whites drive out of the Loop at night to the south and southwest suburbs.
Former Obama-era Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott and Teachers President Randi Weingarten don’t want to see a rerun of all that.
— May 19

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